Kieron the Loaner Ready to Stab, Offer High-Interest Loans

A year ago I quit World of Warcraft. Well, that’s to say, I stopped playing with the fever I had been for so long. My subscription to WoW was paid through June, so I could have, and likely would have, continued playing if it wasn’t for one monumental change in my life. There were issues with Blizzard’s direction that put my Azeroth adventures in jeopardy, but the issues were as secondary to the main reason as possible. My ferret, my first major mark of independence and responsibility after completing college, passed away a year ago today.

This isn’t going to be a sappy post full of pre-adult angst or emotion. Quite the opposite. It’s to celebrate Kieron’s return. Not in the corporeal sense – I’m not Grand Apothecary Putress, after all – but the historical sense. Anyone that has been playing the World of Warcraft TCG may have run into the relatively common hero card ‘Kieron the Loaner’. The aggressive gnome with a lust for coin to the immediate right is modeled after an amalgamation of my furry friend and my stabbing gnome.

You may be wondering exactly how I pulled off this feat. It was rather simple. I met Drew Walker ahead of PAX East 2011, and explained my sappy but honest heartache. Always in the need of ideas for characters, he felt that Cryptozoic could put together an homage. A few screenshots, details of my in-game habits – pet collecting and banking – and a handful of emails later, Kieron the Loaner was born and awaiting release as part of Throne of the Tides. It took me numerous buys to finally acquire him (her), but it was well worth the extra scratch.

Here’s to you, Kieron. Gone, but now immortalized in an IP you loved to interact with – by skittering across the keyboard and ruining my rotation!